Oct. 30 (Bloomberg) -- Hurricane Sandy sent floodwater
gushing into New York’s five boroughs, submerging cars, tunnels
and the subway system and plunging skyscrapers and neighborhoods
into darkness.

The storm shaped up to be among the worst in city history,
rivaling the blizzards of 1888 and 1947. Two deaths were
reported in Queens and more than 670,000 were without power in
the region as of 11:30 p.m. local time yesterday, according to
Consolidated Edison Inc. The company cut electricity to some
areas to save its equipment and a transformer exploded at a
plant on 14th Street, blacking out others. New York University
evacuated its Langone Medical Center when it went dark and
backup systems failed.

“We knew that this was going to be a very dangerous storm
and the storm has met our expectations,” said Mayor Michael
Bloomberg at a news briefing. “The worst of the weather has
come and the city certainly is feeling the impacts.”

After the storm’s tide crested about 8 p.m., the East River
topped its seawall in the Financial District and flowed up Wall
Street in a torrent that turned avenues into canals and
intersections into lakes. Flooding took over Brooklyn’s Red Hook
neighborhood, submerging cars to the roof, while the Gowanus
Canal overflowed and tree limbs plummeted. A downed power line
sparked a fire in the beachfront Queens neighborhood of the
Rockaways and the sea topped Coney Island’s boardwalk.

Record Waters

“This will be the largest storm-related outage in our
history,” said John Miksad, Consolidated Edison’s senior vice
president for electric operations. The previous record was
during Hurricane Irene last year, with about 200,000 New York
City outages, he said.

A flood gauge at Battery Park, at the southernmost end of
Manhattan, registered at 13.88 feet as of 9:24 p.m., beating the
modern record of 10.02 feet in September 1960 during Hurricane
Donna, the National Weather Service said.

“See that Beemer over there?” said Brandon Michon, 26,
who works at the private banking unit of JPMorgan Chase & Co.,
as he pointed to the roof of a white BMW nearly underwater at
the corner of Water and Old Smith Streets. “Ten minutes ago,
the water was up to its tires.”

Manhattan’s Lower East Side was littered with downed store
signs and metal scrap ripped from buildings, and the alarm
systems of submerged cars honked and beeped. Police in cars and
on foot were in Red Hook’s evacuation zones in Brooklyn telling
people to leave their houses and apartments. A few blocks from
the shore line, a man tried and failed to start his car with the
water already up to the windows.

“We’ve never seen this before,” said Dave Lutz, a 20-year
resident of Red Hook, watching water envelop the roof of a car
down Van Brunt Street.

Underground Underwater

The runways became waterways at New York’s three airports,
which make up the nation’s busiest air-travel market, said Steve
Coleman, a spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New
Jersey.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority was investigating
water entering a subway tunnel in Lower Manhattan, said Charles
Seaton, spokesman for the largest U.S. transit agency, which
stopped its 24-hour system for weather for only the second time
in its 108-year history. There’s no way to tell when the system
run again, he said.

Floodwater presents a “significant threat” to tunnels
that cross under the East and Harlem rivers and to restoration
of service, officials said. Station entrances and sidewalk vent
gratings in low-lying areas were covered with plywood and
reinforced with sandbags, said Kevin Ortiz, a spokesman.

Water may wreck MTA electrical and communication systems,
said Charles Watson, director of research and development at
Silver Spring, Maryland-based Kinetic Analysis Corp.

“Once a piece of electrical equipment is exposed to
saltwater, it’s essentially ruined,” he said.

Isolated Island

Manhattan came the closest to becoming a true island since
the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, after officials blocked
the majority of 11 major crossings into the borough.

The Lincoln Tunnel was the only major crossing in and out
of Manhattan by about 8:30 p.m. The Brooklyn Battery Tunnel and
the Queens Midtown Tunnel both had flooding, according to Ortiz.

As of 9:15 p.m. there were two fatalities in Queens. A man
died when a tree fell on his house, and a woman was electrocuted
when she stepped in a puddle that obscured a live wire, said
Detective Kellyann Ort, a spokeswoman for the New York Police
Department.

Earlier, winds caused the partial collapse of a crane
attached to a luxury tower on West 57th Street in Manhattan, and
sheared off the side of a building in Chelsea, leaving
apartments exposed to the elements, beds and pictures still
arranged just so.

In an evening press briefing, the mayor, who is founder and
majority owner of Bloomberg News parent Bloomberg LP, said he
expected the worst would be over by today. More than 3,600
people were in shelters, he said.

The city was helping to move NYU patients, he said.

Eric Spiak, 48, a Lower Manhattan resident who said he
works at Deutsche Bank AG, said he moved from Florida a year
ago, where he lived through tropical cyclones including
Hurricane Andrew in 1992, one of the costliest in U.S. history.